Dogfooding Security
Security education has drifted toward product familiarity, checkbox compliance, and certification prep. Those things have value, but they are not substitutes for understanding how systems actually behave.
Our lab material exists to push back on that trend.
The goal is simple:
- Build systems yourself.
- Break them safely.
- Recover them deliberately.
- Understand the trust boundaries you are changing.
The current material focuses on Linux authentication and boot trust: - FIDO2/U2F login integration - PAM control flow and privilege separation - Recovery planning and rollback - UEFI Secure Boot and boot-chain trust
These are intentionally hands-on labs. Students are expected to experiment, lock themselves out occasionally, troubleshoot, and learn how the system behaves under failure conditions instead of only consuming polished vendor workflows.
Where possible, the labs are designed around repeatable VM-based environments so students can snapshot, recover, and iterate safely. Some topics, especially Secure Boot and hardware trust chains, may still better taught on physical systems because the platform itself matters.
This is also an exercise in dogfooding. We believe security practitioners should routinely operate the technologies they recommend, defend, audit, or mandate.
Not just buy them. Not just certify against them. Actually use them.
Project materials and labs are available here: